Ghost of Fourth Edition's page

Do we know how many encounters are to be expected in a balanced adventuring day in PF2?

Enterprising homebrewers are keen to know!

A few months ago, Jason Bulmahn posted the design goals for PF2. In particular, the second one:

2. Ensure that the new version of the game allows us to tell the same stories and share in the same worlds as the previous edition, but also makes room for new stories and new worlds wherever possible.

The question that arose here was, "who is 'us'?" Paizo (in selling adventure paths)? A GM, running a homebrew? Five people from diverse backgrounds, sitting at a table?

While I had some theories, I wanted to ask about it, but was unable to properly phrase my question.

Last Tuesday, I read an interesting post from Jason Bulmahn:

The goal of this new edition of the game is create a version of Pathfinder that is easier for people to learn, while still giving the depth of character option and customization that we are known for, while also giving GMs better tools to tell the stories they want to tell.

(emphasis added)

It finally snapped and I now understand the design goals as stated.

PF2 wants to allow characters to be customisable, but wants GMs to be able to tell the stories they want to tell.

Say as a GM, I wanted to run an investigation of a murder by poisoning. In Pathfinder, the access to the detect poison cantrip might make this problematic. But lo! PF2 has provided me the tool to say "detect poison is uncommon, you can't learn it" (and even if you could, it's a first level spell).

The decoupling of monsters from being bound by PC rules makes it very easy for a GM to tell their story. A Razmiran calamity can easily be explained as "he's an NPC", while also preventing a high level PC from attempting to replicate his success.

Should a magic barrier exist, a GM can easily prevent it being solved by making it a few levels higher so that the counteract rules prevent the PCs from dispelling it. In Exploration Mode, a GM no longer needs to worry about the druid spending all their time in Wild Shape.

By level-restricting items, the risk of the odd high-level consumable interfering with the story - at least at character creation - has been eliminated.

Players should still have options. It's important from a financial standpoint for the company, and it's an important checkbox to maintain the "feel of Pathfinder". We'll give characters a massive amount of options, as long as it doesn't affect the story the GM wants to tell.

Because after all, it's the GM who's telling the story.

In the Playtest documents, items have levels. It's not entirely clear to me why.

When I first saw levelled items, I thought they would act like the Scaling Items in Unchained. This doesn't appear to be the case.

The only time I've really had to look at them is during character creation, when I had to choose items of a certain level. Which I found increasingly restrictive.

In Pathfinder, magic items are largely restricted by three factors: their cost, their slots, and the prohibition of spending more than 25% of your good on a single item during character creation (replaced by Fame restrictions in PFS).

Magic Items in the Playtest seems to have been restricted by cost, slots, resonance, rarity and level.

What are we gaining from these increased restrictions?

I'd like to put a shout-out to those hard-working sysadmins who were able to keep the website working, including downloads, during the flurry of activity associated with the Playtest release.

Well Done!

I know sysadminning is an underappreciated job, and any failures are always pounced on, but this was an excellent outcome!